In India, Even Cricket Is No Longer Cricket

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Since its inauguration in 2008, the
Indian Premier League, India’s biggest sporting and television
spectacle, has often been on the front rather than the sports
page of Indian newspapers. “Rich, fast and powerful,” this
abbreviated version of the British sport of cricket became “for
many an image of the new India,” as James Astill writes in
“The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Turbulent Rise
of Modern India.” Intoxicating the country’s emerging middle
class, it “also drew in a powerful horde of investors and
chancers -- film stars, politicians and billionaire tycoons.”

I write, of course, as a recent apostate from cricket, the
fiercest of Indian religions, which is Britain’s strangest
inheritance to the subcontinent (or, as Ashis Nandy, one of
India’s leading public intellectuals, put it, an “Indian game
accidentally discovered by the British”). I have seen players I
once idolized for their skill and serene assurance turn into
dissimulating minions of the IPL, whose “silence” over the
steady undermining of Indian cricket “has been bought,” Astill
writes. As bitterly as those whose god has failed, I monitor
news reports of the IPL’s moral perdition, which I fervently
hope against hope are also portents of its demise.

Elite Club

Two recent headlines in particular caught my eye. In May, a
man allegedly kidnapped and killed his teenage cousin in a
ransom plan gone wrong -- an attempt to pay off debts incurred
while betting on Indian Premier League matches. Another man was
caught impersonating an IPL official, duping small-town aspiring
cricketers.

Certainly, the IPL arrived on a landscape of aspiration
altered by India’s economic liberalization. This was a huge, and
admirable, change in itself. Cricket once seemed a forbiddingly
elite, metropolitan and upper-class club. If you lived in a poor
state like Uttar Pradesh and aspired for cricketing glory -- I
was one of these no-hopers -- your hopes were more likely to be
dashed rather than advanced by a coach or cricket board
official. These men would have their own progeny and nephews and
nieces to promote up the long sporting hierarchy. At the very
least, they would demand cash and an introduction to your
sister, if not explicit sexual favors.

The iron doors to cricketing distinction were cracked open
by, among many others, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, one of India’s
richest cricketers, who comes from a small city called Ranchi.
Cricketers from hardscrabble backgrounds can get wealthy
overnight in the IPL; the bonanza from its television and
advertising rights and endorsement deals has already shifted
power in international cricket from the West -- formerly
colonial countries such as England and Australia, in this
instance -- to the East.

Some of the buccaneers running Indian cricket associations
have used their newly found power very crudely against the
former rulers of cricket, proving that anti-colonialism, as much
as patriotism, can be the last refuge of the scoundrel. But the
possibility of humiliation doesn’t deter the English and
Australian cricketers, commentators and coaches who want to get
their hands on Indian cricket’s honeypot. A ghostwriter for one
of Australia’s most famous cricketers recently told me that his
collaborator refused to disclose all he knew about Indian
cricketers and match-fixing in his book as he still hopes for a
lucrative job in India.

Underutilized Potential

But more money and the enhanced capacity of the
underprivileged to aspire -- a combination that in China is
producing world-beating tennis and basketball players -- doesn’t
translate into an enduring and broadened pool of achievers in
India. With its 1 billion-plus population, Astill writes,
“India is much less good at cricket than it should be,” still
struggling to beat New Zealand, a country of 4 million people.

But then, India’s performance in cricket is only more
evidence of shockingly underutilized potential in almost every
realm of economy and culture. All the great talent, wealth and
glamour of Mumbai have yet to result in a single film comparable
to the best Iran has consistently offered during a decade of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and stifling Western sanctions. For that
matter, no Indian company has come close to the international
brand recognition of Hong Kong’s Haier Electronics Group Co.
Ltd. and China’s Lenovo Group Ltd.

Seeking to figure out India’s “poor record of harnessing
the talents of its vast population,” Astill deploys the unusual
stratagem of watching and playing cricket matches in remote
villages and towns, while looking at cricket association
memberships and balance sheets.

A former correspondent for the Economist in India, Astill
is an unusual sponsor of the cultural-studies view of South
Asia. He also writes with solicitude -- relatively rare in
recent books about “rising” India -- for the also-rans, the
perennially disadvantaged and the utterly hopeless. He
recognizes that for even the most fortunate of them, the dream
of emancipation is fraught with the likelihood of severe self-diminution. One gifted cricketer he meets in a Mumbai slum is
wary of the hard leather ball that “might injure his hands,
which he used to make tiny stitches on silk saris.” Writing
from that perspective allows him to quickly get beyond the
obvious, avoiding a commonplace journalistic deference to
India’s mightiest, and very smooth-tongued, businessmen and
politicians.

In fact, Astill brings a divertingly caustic energy to his
encounters with the successful. He seems to know that the rules
of the game in India, in life as in cricket, are fixed against
the underprivileged. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, he writes,
“India was a democracy in which power and wealth was controlled
by a tiny elite.” The elite has more members than before, and
innumerable more beating on its doors. But a “closer look at
the way power is actually wielded in India” will show that the
country’s “rags-to-riches success stories, in cricket and
otherwise, are still exceptional, and highlight just how hard it
remains for most people to get on.”

Crony Brahmins

Older hierarchies -- such as those of caste -- may have
altered their character under the pressures of electoral
democracy. But Brahminism -- the conviction of entitlement,
above all -- reincarnates itself endlessly in India. “Most
political parties are family-run businesses, passed from father
to son or daughter.” Business families, who benefited from
India’s protectionist economy, are also the primary exponents of
crony capitalism today. Dynasties of the incorrigibly second-rate partly account for the badness of Bollywood.

It should be no surprise that two-thirds of India’s 27
cricket associations are run by politicians. The main cricket
council in India, the Board of Control for Cricket in India,
spends less than 8 percent of its fabulous revenue on developing
the game in India. Astill explains that “the good of Indian
cricket is not the chief priority of the politicians who run the
BCCI. They are mainly concerned to perpetuate their power. That
is why they devote so much time to fighting their nasty civil
wars and building Ozymandian stadiums where there are no cricket
pitches for the poor boys to play on.” More disturbing, there
is “little resistance” to this rampant subversion of
democratic values and assertion of private privilege.

Writing of this wildly successful revolution of the elites
in Indian cricket, Astill manages to elucidate the larger
gridlock in India today. Unlike China, South Korea or Israel --
to take three countries with very different political systems --
India has very rarely had elites with a shared consensus about
modernizing their country. Lately, even their rhetoric about
uprooting feudalism, nepotism, corruption and other forms of
unjust hierarchy has been strangely muted. India’s sectarian-minded rulers, presiding over both a patrimonial state and a
winner-takes-all economy, have been mostly busy feathering their
own nests.

Nor has the country’s poor majority -- fragmented by caste
and region, and lulled by the promise of routine elections --
been well-placed to demand better treatment. In this sense,
cricket, once synonymous with fairness, has indeed turned into
an Indian game. If some of us feel especially aggrieved about
its unlamented capture by special interests, it is because the
men on the cricket pitch once represented, more than anyone else
in the new India, the promise and appeal of egalitarian
opportunity.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire:
The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a
Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India.)